Maybe love is* I wonder who you were when I didn't know you yet. I want to see how you first came to know the world and the ways the world tried to teach you that it loved you. I want to know if it hurt, and how, and how sweet.

I wonder who you will be when you reach your best, a person I haven't met yet. I wonder how you will love, and how you will hurt, and how you will learn. I want to see your sad smile, your tears, your broken heart; the days that feel strange, I want to be a witness to. I want to cry for you; I want to know you that well. I want your hurt to lie closer to my heart than my own. I want my heart to be jumping out of my chest into your hands. I don't need 'safe'. I need right.

And honestly there's no telling what that means.
I want you to lie beside me, in bed at night. I want each of us to think our own hands cruel, for the possibility that one of us might ever hurt the other. I don't trust my hands, my heart, my lips, my body to ever love you right. But let me tell you at my simplest, that I love you with the most truth a human soul can offer.

That when you are near or when you are far, I love you at the center of my being. That I always need you. That everything that hurts, hurts twice more when you aren't there to lift me from it.

Lift me from my reverie, my dizzy spell. That when your hand isn't in mine, I am always waiting for you. But when we are apart, never mind what is going on in my heart... I smile at the thought of your smile, cherish whatever is making you happy. Maybe it's when you're in line with the groceries, or with the sunlight slanting across your face. You are my every joy, my only, my absolute, my everyday prayer.